EVERY MONTH MPR'S MUSIC DEPARTMENT asks
a different individual to give us a list of five
compact discs of his or her choosing. The criteria are strictly
personal, and the choices cover a pretty wide gamut. But several discs
come up again and again: Carlos Kleiber conducting Beethoven symphonies;
Miles Davis and colleagues on their album Kind of Blue; and Glenn Gould's
1955 recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations.

What makes this the most famous Bach recording ever made? It doesn't
hurt that it's a brilliant performance of a musical masterpiece, but
it's been helped out by some other factors. To start with, the glamor
of the soloist - in Gould's case, a kind of anti-glamor glamor, but
no less potent for all that.

Classical performers, compared with their counterparts in pop and rock,
are a boring, monochrome bunch. They play the same music, have the same
opinions, behave the same at concerts. It doesn't take much originality
to stand out in this crowd and Gould had it by the bushel. He was reclusive,
eccentric, obsessive. He avoided some composers (Chopin, Rachmaninoff),
trashed others (Mozart). He had some notorious mannerisms: crouching
over the keyboard, singing to himself during recording sessions. Most
famously, at 31, he quit giving recitals, proclaiming that it was through
recordings, not public performances, that musicians would reach their
audiences in the future. As usual in this kind of relationship, the
public, feeling itself ignored, only grew more fascinated.

Then there is the music. It's rarely acknowledged but true that the classical-music
world spends more time paying reverence to Bach than actually listening
to all of his music. In sheer terms of bulk, Bach is mainly a composer
of organ music and sacred choral music - a little too remote from the
modern liking for big symphonies and warmly melodic operas. But in writing
the Goldbergs, Bach created an entry in that charmed circle of pieces
(Beethoven's Seventh and Schubert's String Quintet are some others) that
satisfy the beginner, the aesthete, and the musical marketplace equally.

Sample Gould's Goldberg Variations

And lastly the brilliance and confidence of the music-making itself.
Let's celebrate Bach's birthday by looking at just a few samples: (For
streaming audio help, see How
to Listen.)

Aria and Variation 1. The theme that the Variations are built
on. Gould recorded the Aria twenty times before he was satisfied he
had struck the right note of simplicity. The following variation Gould
described as a "precipitous outburst ... which abruptly curtails
the preceding tranquility."

Recording Information
Gould recorded the Goldberg Variations in June of 1955 in New York.
Often reissued, this recording is currently available as CBS 38479 (compact
disc and cassette).

It is not the only Gould recording of the Goldbergs. In 1981, the year
before his death, Gould made another studio recording of the work (CBS
37779). In addition, in his early years he performed it in concerts
and broadcasts, and tapes of these performances have since shown up
as commercial recordings, sonic warts and all.